Valve has kickstarted its busy week at this year's GDC, announcing Source 2 as well as revealing further plans for Steam Controllers, Steam Machines and announcing an all-new product, Steam Link.

Coming over ten years since its predecessor launched in 2004 with Counter-Strike: Source, the Source 2 engine will be available for free to developers. "The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity," said Valve's Jay Stelly in an official press release.

"Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favourite games. We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1740447Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:15:00 +0000Project Morpheus release will be in the first half of 2016

Sony has unveiled a near-final version of its Morpheus virtual reality headset, revealing specs closer to what we can expect from the consumer version - and when we can expect to be able to buy it.

Morpheus headset will boast a 5.7 inch OLED screen, with a resolution of 1920x1080. Impressively, it'll boast a 120Hz refresh rate - besting the 90Hz in the Vive headset that HTC is making in partnership with Valve, and also the 75Hz that Oculus Rift DK2 currently runs at.

In a presentation at this year's GDC in San Francisco, Sony's Shuhei Yoshida also revealed several other key details - such as how the headset will boast a latency of less than 18 milliseconds and features nine tracking LEDs. It will also feature an improved viewing angle of 100 degrees.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1740435Tue, 03 Mar 2015 23:30:00 +0000Gone Home is no longer in development for consoles

As reported by DualShockers and confirmed by Eurogamer, the console version is no longer being worked on. “Our publishing deal with Majesco has ended, and the console version is not in active development,” developer Fullbright's co-founder Steve Gaynor told Eurogamer.

Fullbright is currently working on a first-person sci-fi adventure called Tacoma. It looks a bit like a mix of Gone Home with the dev's previous work on the wonderful BioShock 2 DLC Minerva's Den.

Warner Bros. has announced a 4th September release date for Avalanche Studios' Mad Max in the UK.

That date applies to the game's PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions.

There's no mention at all of the previously-announced PS3 and Xbox 360 editions, and a Game Informer report confirms that these have been "left by the wayside" to focus on optimising the PC and current-gen versions instead.

In Eve Online all the big stuff we read about goes down in nullsec, unpoliced space. Players own it, players fight over it. More specifically, the big powers fight over sovereignty of systems, which is where they get their resources and how they fund their wars.

This is all about to change. The nullsec populace has been sitting on its hands for months waiting to see what game developer CCP has planned for sovereignty, and now CCP has finally obliged them.

Publisher Konami had planned an official announcement tomorrow (there's even a countdown on the Metal Gear Solid website pointing to 2pm UK time on 4th March). But an eagle-eyed NeoGAF user found a couple of video interviews with series creator Hideo Kojima on website IGN's server, and they reveal the release date. (They've now been pulled.)

In the video Kojima stresses Metal Gear Solid 5 will be his final Metal Gear Solid. But then he always says that, doesn't he?

Heart of Thorns is the first expansion for MMO Guild Wars 2, and it was playable last week for the first time.

I captured footage as I took the new Revenant profession for a run and saw the densely detailed and vast new Maguuma Jungle for mein own eyes. I played the new Stronghold player versus player mode but unfortunately wasn't able to capture from it.

The Revenant is the profession that summons legends from Guild Wars history to use in battle. I tried the Legendary Dwarf Stance (Jalis Ironhammer) and the Legendary Demon Stance (Mallyx). It seems like you can switch between them without much cooldown, if any, allowing for some strong combination possibilities. There will be more legends to choose from eventually.

The new version has a number of fresh areas, including a section set outside. Inside, the map's floors and walls are still detailed with pipes and other objects, although surfaces are less shiny, more dirty and worn.

It includes three new maps for use in classic Survivor mode, and new playable character Ricardo, Sevastopol Station's Deputy Marshall.

In The Trigger, set before the events of Alien: Isolation, Ricardo tries to help Marshal Waits destroy the alien by using a package of explosives last seen with one of the marshals. You have to secure Prisoner Processing, track down the missing marshal in Synthetic Storage then blast the alien into space. At least, that's the plan.

Co-developed by Danish developer Interceptor, Bombshell was revealed to the world as a top-down sci-fi title starring bomb technician Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison.

But the main character's clothing - or lack of it - received a mixed reaction. It was unlikely her armour would offer much protection should her bomb disposal missions ever go wrong, dressed as she was in little more than a pair of pants and a metal bra.

The Winter Patch is designed to improve netcode and soldier collision, as well as tweak the Squad Obliteration game mode so it becomes the lead competitive mode in DICE's first-person shooter. The new Squad Obliteration scales down the fast-paced objective-based gameplay of the original to a 5v5 competitive environment.

Night in the Woods - a quirky coming-of-age game that totally made me tear up despite being played on a noisy E3 showfloor - has been pushed back until 2016.

One of its three developers, Scott Benson, noted this new, later launch window during a small presentation at GDC attended by Eurogamer.

"We were shooting for 2015, but it's probably going to go into 2016 at this point," said Benson. "Basically it's the three of us making a game.... that's why it might take a tiny bit longer." He noted that it's been in development for about 14 months at this point.

Unreal Engine 4 is now free for anyone to develop on, Epic Games has announced.

So how's Epic going to make money on this, you ask? Simple: revenue off projects created with it. Here's how it works:

When devs ship a product developed in Unreal Engine 4, they'll pay five per cent of the revenue they make after the first $3000 per quarter to Epic. So if a dev makes a game, but it only grosses $2900 in a quarter, that dev won't have to pay Epic a penny. If the game makes $13K, they'd owe five per cent of the $10K after the first $3K (so $500 in this instance).

I'm joined by Thomas was Alone creator Mike Bithell to take a look at the latest build of Volume, his upcoming stealth game that has lots of famous people's voices in it.

I think it's worth watching just to hear Mike's exasperation as I misunderstand the layout of his levels, but you may also enjoy some of the discussion surrounding the game's initial design and inspirations. Either way, it should give you a good idea of what to expect from Volume, ahead of its eventual release this year:

Knights of Pen & Paper 2 will be released for PC, iOS and Android devices on 14th May.

It's a sequel to the quirky pixelated role-playing game we really really liked in 2013. You play a bunch of people playing as a group of fantasy heroes - a game within a game. That allows plenty of tongue-in-cheek pokes at the RPG genre.

The game itself was limited but the sequel is beefier. It's now 16-bit with overhauled combat, new crafting, dynamically generated dungeons and more races and classes too.

Interplay has announced plans to remaster light-hearted 90s fighting game ClayFighter.

In a press release the company said it was working with Drip Drop Games to remaster all the previous ClayFighter games and release them as a new collection.

Digging into the detail, Interplay said new gameplay mechanics would be introduced, such as double jumping, air dashing, counters, and reversals, with unique supers and "Claytality" moves for each character.

Vocal interaction with video games is nothing new. We've all let fly with a string of choice expletives thanks to a poorly placed checkpoint or a cheap shot that leads to an unfair Game Over screen. More rare are the games that actually listen to what you say, and respond in kind.

From Sega's super-creepy Seaman to PS3 obscurity Lifeline, and on through the trials and tribulations of Tom Clancy's EndWar and too many Xbox games with inorganic Kinect features, the idea of talking to the screen and seeing your commands acted out remains a powerful - if elusive - dream. Indie strategy game There Came an Echo comes closer than most, but can't quite sell the technology in the long term.

It's a cyberpunky sort of tale, which opens with a guy called Corrin working in a trendy Californian tech company. He's invented an open source encryption system called Radial Lock, so advanced that nobody can actually use it until the quantum computers needed to run the code have been invented. Of course, it turns out they have been invented, and dodgy people want Corrin for their own nefarious ends.

Your game needn't be a blockbuster in order to look impressive. Case in point: Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the Czech-made game from Warhorse Studios. This is the medieval role-playing game with no fantasy - but a lot of mud.

As the oldest member of Eurogamer's video team and the only one who can legitimately remember the whole of the 90s (Chris, as far as we can tell, was born in 2008), Ian took it upon himself to try out upcoming nostalgia-filled shooter Strafe.

In his estimation, developer Pixel Titans has managed to create the perfect homage to his favourite games of yesteryear. You can watch some gore-soaked gameplay and hear his thoughts in the video below. Let's bounce.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1739899Mon, 02 Mar 2015 09:27:00 +0000Watch indie games star in House of Cards season three

House of Cards' just-released third season features two new guest stars: iPad puzzler Monument Valley and PC adventure The Stanley Parable.

Kevin Spacey's character, the series' lead, US president Frank Underwood, has long been a fan of video games. But the new run of episodes sees Underwood try indie titles for the first time.

Monument Valley pops up early in the season and acts as something of a revelation for Underwood. It's featured in several scenes, as he plays the game and then reads colleagues a review.

Valve has partnered with Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker HTC to make its virtual reality headset.

The Vive is manufactured by HTC and powered by Valve's SteamVR. A consumer version is due out "holiday 2015", so it'll probably beat rival VR headsets Oculus Rift and Morpheus to market. A developer version will be available in the spring.

HTC said that as the Vive is powered by SteamVR, plenty of games that use it will be available soon on Steam.

It's fair to say that whenever there's a Dynasty Warriors, there'll be an Empires to go with it. This latest instalment follows the usual path; take the combat from the latest Dynasty Warriors and weave strategy all around it. The hack-and-slash carnage is embedded, compartmentalised and re-focused within a superstructure of turn-based expansion and consolidation. For many, it'll be the same old story, but it offers a multitude of joys for diehard fans, especially if they haven't played DW7 Empires. For anyone lured in by DW8, Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires sets a much deeper and detailed challenge.

Barely building on the previous Empires title, DW8's take includes the traditional Koei dash of some new stuff, including marriage and children. You can play it as a loyal servant to one of Dynasty Warriors' famous generals, sticking with them or stabbing them in the back, or work as a free agent for hire and set up shop on your own. Ultimately you're seeking the unification of China, and the most fun to be had is in taking it all by force.

A real highlight is the opportunity to create your own warrior and go fighting in marvellous costumes. I set up a character based on my cat, gave it my favourite Musou warrior Zhou Tai's move-set and quickly formed an alliance with the common first-bloods of the Dynasty Warriors universe - the Yellow Turbans. I happily followed the orders of crazed wizard Zhang Jiao and we expanded our territories with decent pace, but old Zhang Jiao has little love for his people, conferring the rank of DESPOT upon my feline swordswoman. This would not do at all. Nobody makes Monktonia a despot.

InXile's wonderful post-apocalyptic role-playing game Wasteland 2 will receive a graphical facelift as part of a move to a better version of its game engine.

Wasteland 2 was a Kickstarter that raised just shy of $3m back in April 2012. It had asked for $900,000.

The game released on Steam in 2014, and so far inXile has released six major patches. "Part of the newfound freedom we've gained from being an exclusively crowdfunded company is that it allows us to offer a high level of post-release support," project lead Chris Keenan wrote in an update on the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter page.

Riot president and co-founder Marc Merrill has moved to clarify the developer's position on League of Legends streaming rules following a high-profile dispute earlier this week - and expressed regret for the way he initially reacted to it.

Last night Star Trek Online players gathered to pay their respects to Leonard Nimoy, who died aged 83.

Nimoy, who played Spock in the Star Trek TV show and films, took part in a presentation of Star Trek Online at the 2008 Las vegas Star Trek Convention, alongside then Cryptic Studios producer Jack Emmert. You can see this in the video, below.

Yesterday, an image showing pStar Trek Online layers paying their respects quickly shot up to the top of the front page of Reddit. One user, arnacle999, said around 1000 players travelled to the five-year-old MMO's version of Vulcan following yesterday's news. The game then split those players up into instances of between 15 and 20 characters.

This one took us by surprise. A study undertaken by US pollmeisters Nielsen revealed this week that "better resolution" is the top reason people bought PlayStation 4 over its competition. It's a remarkable, perhaps even unbelievable result, and one we wanted to dig into more deeply, so we contacted the director of Nielsen Games, Nicole Pike, asking about the size and make-up of the sample and how respondents were directed into giving their answers.

Pike tells us that data for the report was collected using "Nielsen's proprietary, high-quality online panel in the United States". Two waves of data were collected, the first between November 7th and November 12th, 2014. The second came a couple of months later, from January 22nd to January 27th, 2015. In terms of the demographic make-up of each sample, wave one consisted of around 2,000 teens and adults aged over 13, along with 400 kids aged between six and 12. The second wave consisted of a further 2,000 teens/adults aged over 13.

"Post-survey, raw data was weighted to ensure representation of the US general population based on current US census data," Pike added.

Somewhere down the line in my life I sat in a rented room in Kuala Lumpur watching a Sim approximation of the rapper Drake grumble and fix a broken toilet.

I made a Sims 4 neighbourhood from my Spotify playlists: Drake and Nicki Minaj in one house together, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Andy Samberg in another house with my own Sim Cara.

Because Drake and Nicki create their own lyrical fanfic in which they 'ship' each other, I made both their Sims flirt over breakfast, over the grand piano I had only just managed to buy on Drake's terrible Amateur Entertainer job for $23 an hour (probably his Degrassi years) and on the red velvet couch I primarily bought because it belonged in a Cash Money video.

The mod in question, Fluffy Manager 5000, still has a few kinks to work out regarding this new feature. For one, it's only effective with gamepads. "Keyboard/mouse controls always affect both players, so it's not usable," Sectus noted in his YouTube notes. Furthermore, the local co-op option still isn't available in Raid mode, though Sectus said he's working on implementing that.

VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh has released a free browser game about running a food cart.

Dubbed Grab Them by the Eyes, the game follows the exploits of a lowly food cart entrepreneur who finds himself competing with a couple of young punks who have rolled up to his corner with their new street food eatery Filthy Burger. To fend off your new competitors, you must lure more customers to your cart by the end of the week. And how will you do this? Not by making delicious cuisine. That's kind of a given for food carts (at least in my part of the world). No, you must attract customers by making a kick-ass sign.

To do this you'll have to go to the sign shop every day and buy new slogans, colours, borders and effects to make an appealing marque. Each element of your sign is purchased as a card with a certain number assigned to it dictating how many customer it will rake in. But people crave change. What's in vogue one day may not be the next, so you've got to play smart with your cash to succeed in this corner cook-off.

The Montréal-based studio offered the following description of its latest title: "We Happy Few is the tale of a plucky bunch of moderately terrible people trying to escape from a lifetime of cheerful denial. Set in a drug-fueled, retrofuturistic city in an alternative 1960s England, you'll have to blend in with its other inhabitants, who don't take kindly to people who don't abide by their not-so-normal rules."

Based on that description and the following teaser trailer, We Happy Few appears to be a first-person game about masquerading amongst your oh-so-cheerful friends and neighbors.

La-Mulana, a game that can only be described as "Fez meets Dark Souls," is coming to Vita on 4th March (or 3rd March in North America) in a spruced up edition entitled La-Mulana EX.

The colossal metroidvania that combines expansive, obtuse puzzles with excessively deadly enemies was initially released in 2005 as a free PC game in Japan, but was remade into a commercial product where it came to WiiWare in 2012 and Steam in 2013. Now Vita players will get a chance to fail at developer Nigoro's fiendishly difficult expedition.

Port developer Pygmy Studio worked with Nigoro on this enhanced edition that makes the game a tad more accessible without making it noticeably easier. As detailed on the PlayStation Blog, there's now a Monster Bestiary to check out details on the creatures you come across, and some puzzles have been slightly adjusted to make more sense.

Online servers for Ridge Racer Unbounded have been shut down in Europe, publisher Bandai Namco has announced.

As of today, the game's multiplayer mode is no longer be available on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

"The publisher and developer wanted to take this opportunity to thank, once again, all the players for their support of Ridge Racer Unbounded throughout the years," a statement posted to Namco's official site explained.

UPDATE 27TH FEBRUARY: Ding! In three days Crowfall has surpassed its Kickstarter goal of $800k. It's not far off the pace set by another Kickstarter MMO, Camelot: Unchained, which eventually finished with $2.2m. As the makers of Crowfall mentioned below, in this piece, they'd be happy emulating that.

Wrote they in a Kickstarter update: "This is a huge vote of confidence for our vision, and our company. We are inspired by your passion and honoured by the faith that you have placed in us. We won't let you down.

"We set out to find an audience to support us in creating something different, something innovative... and now we have, we are going to do exactly that. Thank you for making this happen."

Dungeon of the Endless, Subnautica - quite a lot of Early Access video games start with spaceships in flames, hurtling artfully towards strange planets, bound for tales of peril and survival. Possibly this is just the best way to kick off a narrative that will involve crafting and permadeath, two of this era's greatest loves. Partly, though, it seems a tacit acknowledgement of how so many people feel about Early Access in general - that it is the place where bright promise burns up, where landing sites become graves.

This isn't the case, of course. For every high profile botch, there's the flowering of something strange and special that traditional development models might have accidentally crushed. Forget Godus, then, and forget The Stomping Ground: here are some of the current crop of Early Access games that seem to be delivering on their promises.

You need precision and you need keen strategy to be a spy - at least you need that to be the kind of spy you get in the movies. Klei seems entirely up to the job, taking the deliriously wonderful premise of a turn-based espionage game, and delivering it via regular updates, two a month, generally alternating between small and big patches, so you're never far away from getting something special.